Help!

[Spyderbyte]

I don't understand what the deal is. I have a cable modem and wireless router that used to work perfectly, and suddenly my connection is terrible. It's slow on both this desktop using an ethernet cable, and my laptop with a wireless usb adaptor. I've tried unplugging evertything and letting it reset, I've restarted the computer several times, and I've tried skipping the router and connecting my modem directly to this computer. Nothing seems the help in the slightest.

I can't load most pages, and those that I can take several minutes at least. Gmail gets stuck on the loading screen after username and password, and I haven't been able to download any files.

I'm running out of patience and would greatly appreciate any help.

Thanks!

Spyderbyte

[DarkerLine]

wireless isn't supposed to be consistently reliable, but...

[Arcane Wizard]

I'd check for spyware, clean my host file, and check if there's any problems with my ISP.

[Spyderbyte]

I would understand if just my wireless wasn't working too well, but my desktop uses a cable instead of wireless. I've also tried connecting it directly to my modem.

I've already checked for spyware, but neither computer can connect, so I'm assuming its a network problem. How would I go about cleaning my host file and checking my ISP? I'm a noob about this stuff if you couldn't already tell.

Thanks again!

Spyderbyte

[alexrudd]

not sure about a host file, but your ISP is the company that provides you internet service. You should have a telephone number somewhere, call them up. :)

Did you say you have cable? I think cable's speed is affected by the number of users on the network, so maybe a large number of people are using a lot of bandwidth?

[Arcane Wizard]

What do you mean with neither computer can connect?

And heavy traffic on the network is just not going to happen from one day to the next, and never to the extend of making it work worse than a 56k modem.

[Bledoux]

Maybe try deleting things that you may have downoaded that you don't need anymore. You know, clear up some space.

[Brazucs]

I'd download Ad-aware.
It's free, awesome, but dumb. In order to delete the *ware you got running, you need to restart in safe mode. Faster that way, too.


Edit: The downloading thing, I agree...
Does anyone know why when I download big files, they just randomly stop downloading for a huge time and then say it times out? I'll try to get a screenshot and maybe Firefox.

[Arcane Wizard]

[Spyderbyte]

[elfprince13]

I wouldn't complain..I have a 56K modem..rock on!

[NETWizz]

[NETWizz]

[Spyderbyte]

OK, I'm tried letting everything reset, and that didn't seem to help either. Could someone be kind enough to look up the road runner customer support information? It should be at http://www.rr.com but I can't get the site to load.

Thanks!

Spyderbyte

[Arcane Wizard]

[Spyderbyte]

Cool, thanks! I'll see what I can do.

EDIT: Very weird. After more than half an hour and three people on tech support, they finally decided to send someone out. Once I hung up I decided to reset everything one more time, and disconnected absolutely everything. After letting it everything sit for a few minutes, I reconnected it all and turned on my computer.

I don't want to speak too soon, I also had a moment of triumph before my hard drive permanantly died, but everything seems to be working again!

Thanks to everyone for the help!

EDIT 2: Bah, I knew I was speaking too soon. It couldn't have been more than ten minutes after posting this when the loading bar for a different site pretty much stopped halfway through. Yep, everything was slow again. Restarting didn't help, only turning my computer off and unplugging the power cables for the modem and router. After being disconnected for a while, they seem to be working again.

Chances are good it'll stop working again, so now I'm very confused. Why would it work well for a while and then quit, only to repeat later?

Thanks again!

Spyderbyte

[Arcane Wizard]

I've been having some internet issues myself, pages either loaded perfectly, or timed out. I thought this might be a DNS issue since other services worked fine, and thought it'd go away in a couple of hours. This morning it was still acting strange.

So, I opened up task monitor (ctrl+shift+esc) and had a look at what's going on.

And something strange was indeed going on, there where 2 processes called csrss.exe, and one of them was in caps and taking up 50mb of my swap file. Normally the 'client/server runtime subsystem' doesn't take that much and certainly isn't running twice. So I figured it'd probably be a worm or trojan of some kind, and unleashed Symantec Antivirus on the file, wondering why it hadn't catched it in the first place. Symantec didn't think there was anything wrong with it though.

However, knowing csrss.exe is often faked by all kinds of trojans and virusses, I checked the path where CSRSS.EXE was in. This should be c:\windows\system32\ but it was in c:\windows\system\. It also had a different icon (the .MSI file icon, not a regular executable) and it's version information was empty.

Recycle bin to the rescue! Or so I thought, of course it was still running so I couldn't remove it, and it wouldn't let me end the process either.

So, I checked my startup list, and surprise surprise! (/sarcasm) It was there. So, simply disabled it there, rebooted, and threw it in the trashcan.

Now my internet is working perfectly again.

In other words, check for virusses, trojans, the works. If anything wierd is going on, see if getting rid of it helps. If you can't find anything wierd going on, make a screenshot of your processes (in taskmanager, including any columns that might be usefull, taskmanager->view->set columns) and post it here.

[NETWizz]

The program I recomend is HiJackThis for removing items like the CSRSS.EXE trojan you described. After unchecking it, I would go to the section to schedule a file deletion on reboot. How that works is you schedule the deleteion of any system file and it marks it in the registry as a RunOnce System task that will occur before the system Files start loading.

Next, it is best to just hit the reset button. Don't let teh system shutdown correctly because sometimes programs are sent a shutdown command and asked to politely terminate. Durring that time, most Trojans ensure they are set to start back up again. So, hit reset or pull the power plug.

There is also a SigVerif tool to verify signatures to see if it is signed by MS, and there is SFC /Scannow to verifity the system files are okay.


What to do is run SFC /scannow and have an XP CD with the Appropriate Service Pack Level. E.g. if running SP2, have an XP CD with SP2 already on it! You can slipstream your disc if you want.

When done, I would scan for viri and Adware (Lavasoft Ad-Aware) and then use HiJackThis to verify your startup is okay. Next, I would re-install your Service Pack again to ensure anything missing gets copied to the system. e.g. I did it because I was missing some Control Pannel Extentions.

You should finally check to ensure all of your Drivers are up-to-date and Signed By MS if possible for use with whatever Service pack you run. e.g. some Drivers are not recomended for SP2.

Finally, you should have some sort of Firewall and Antivirus software package. Be sure to update those in addition to Windows.

If you have any further problems, Re-Install TCP/IP, reset the Winsock Catalog, and ensure you have no Gaps in your Layered Service Providers. Next, you should verify that TCP/IP works by pingging something by IP. After that, verify DNS works by pingging something by DNS name on your network, and ensure NETBIOS is working too by pinging by computer name.

The easiest way to verify DNS is okay is to set a DNS suffix on two or more computers on the network then ping by computer name.

If you set the computer name COMPUTER1 and you set the suffix MYNETWORK and ping COMPUTER1 you should see:

Pinging COMPUTER1.mynetwork
...
...
...
Loss (0%)

Finally, you should ping something on the Internet like Google.com and check the latency.

When you are done, remove the DNS Suffix

Finally, ping something on the Internet

ping unitedti.org
...
...

you get the idea. If name resolution takes too long or doesn't resolve, flush the dns cache.

ipconfig /flushdns (I think that is the command use /? to check)


Finally, you can ask your ISP to provide you with the closest DNS servers for your area. You would put this info into your router if you have one, or your computer if you don't


To make a long story shorter, networking typically works or does not work at all.

[Spyderbyte]

Thanks for the suggestions, but I think I've narrowed down the problem. Something is wrong with my modem itself, if it's on for too long it gets warm (normal) but within 20 minutes or so it gets fairly warm to the touch and starts having all the problems I talked about above.

I don't know if it's dusty or what the problem is, but I'm going to try to get a service guy out to replace it.

Thanks!

Spyderbyte

[NETWizz]

that is an excellent idea.

What m odem do you have?